Laura Ingraham Hammers Oprah Winfrey for 'Broad-Brush Race-Baiting'

Civility matters and race shouldn’t come between people — at least unless it benefits a liberal candidate, it seems.

That’s the point that Fox News host Laura Ingraham just made about billionaire leftist Oprah Winfrey’s stump speech for Democrats. Winfrey recently used her star power to support Stacey Abrams in the Georgia race for governor, but many people took issue with her use of race to drive a wedge between the candidates.

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“Got to hand it to Oprah. She’s a great speaker, but I kinda liked her better when she was giving away Toyotas and refrigerators,” Ingraham stated on her Thursday program.

The big problem, in Ingraham’s view, is that Winfrey didn’t focus on facts, but instead played the race card.

“To try to tie the candidacy of the Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp to the scourge of racism and even lynchings? Come on, Oprah!” the conservative host scolded.

“It’s dehumanizing, it’s completely baseless, it’s totally cruel and again I say, you’re much better than that and you’re much bigger than that,” she continued.

“And I also say this to Oprah Winfrey, how is this living our ‘best life now?’” the Fox host wondered.

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Watch her commentary for yourself; Ingraham’s primary criticism of Winfrey takes place between 4:38 and 6:10 in the video below.

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In her stump speech for the Democrat Abrams, Winfrey implied that black voters were somehow dishonoring their entire race if they didn’t support the liberal African American candidate.

“For anybody here who has an ancestor who didn’t have the right to vote and you are choosing not to vote wherever you are in this state, in this country, you are dishonoring your family,” she declared, according to The Huffington Post.

“You are disrespecting and disregarding their legacy, their suffering and their dreams when you don’t vote,” Winfrey continued, alluding to southern blacks who couldn’t vote over a century ago.

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Ingraham wasn’t impressed with the rhetoric.

“This kind of broad-brush race-baiting desensitizes us to the real racists out there who should be condemned and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law when they commit heinous crimes and use violence to hurt and maim people of a different race,” she pointed out.

“By the way, what did Kemp ever do aside from running against a black opponent? Nothing.”

She’s right. Winfrey’s implication — although she didn’t state it outright — that black Georgians were expected to vote a certain way because of their race is the opposite of diversity. It’s an attitude that suggests black Americans cannot think for themselves and must do as they’re told on election day.

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That’s exactly the sort of outdated attitude that conservatives including Candace Owens and Star Parker have called “the plantation,” and which many black voices are now rejecting.

The reality is that racism will continue as long as people continue to obsess over race. It’s time to move forward. As Ingraham pointed out, Winfrey should be a shining example of skin color not being a barrier to success … but the fact that she has instead injected race into this election is truly disappointing.

Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan, before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico.
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Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.